“Facts are stubborn things,” President John Adams once said. “And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

True, facts are stubborn things, but…people are more stubborn.

In a battle between logic and emotion, emotion will win over facts most of the time.

Researchers have estimated that 80% of decisionmaking is emotional, and only 20% rational. According to Kevin Roberts, CEO of advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi, “Reason leads to conclusions. Emotion leads to action.”

Just look at the US presidential elections. How rational is any of what has been happening there? Fact-checkers have been busy, but facts don’t seem to be what many voters are looking for.

The Brexit vote was completely unexpected by those who thought their long list of economic arguments was enough to convince the British people to stay in the European Union.

And in the Middle East, UNESCO just passed a resolution claiming that the Temple Mount and Western Wall in Jerusalem have no historical connection to Jews (despite thousands of years of evidence).

These days, it feels like facts have been thrown out the window.

The fact is (whether or not it will convince you!) that emotions are powerful things. Feelings of frustration, patriotism, nostalgia, jealousy or fear can easily outweigh well thought-out, logic-based arguments. And sometimes they can drive people to make up their own “facts” that, repeated often enough, take on a life of their own.

But this doesn’t only happen in politics. Think about the communication campaigns out there trying to convince people to change their behaviors. What do most of them do? Lay out the cold, hard facts to persuade people rationally why they should do the right/healthy/socially beneficial thing. No wonder they don’t make much of a dent!

So, how do you motivate members of your community to take action on your health or social issues? You don’t need to abandon facts altogether – they play an important role in providing information and establishing credibility.

But facts alone are not enough.

Combine your most compelling facts with an emotional appeal. This is not a cynical thing to do – this is how our brains work! Do research with your priority populations to find out what they care about. Align your behavioral “product” with people’s values to show how they can get what they want and need emotionally by coming on board.

Social marketing gives you a systematic approach to designing social impact programs that take emotion into account. Making a behavior fun, social and easy are only some of the ways you can go beyond providing “just the facts.”

What happens when a French agency racks up over 50,000 likes on Instagram for a campaign aimed at raising awareness of alcoholism among young people? Success, right? By creating a fake account for a glamorous young French woman named Louise Delage and posting several photos on Instagram daily, each of which included her holding an alcoholic drink, the “Like My Addiction” campaign for organization Addict Aide hoped to show that it’s not always easy to tell that someone is addicted to alcohol.

At the end of the 2-month campaign, the agency, BETC, revealed that Louise was not real, and shared the purpose of the campaign with their followers. After the reveal, web traffic to Addict Aide’s website spiked to five times normal and numerous media outlets covered the campaign. Clearly the agency knows how to run Instagram campaigns to get attention and gain a following (with more than 16,000 Instagram followers in just a few months). But even they admitted that their important message mostly missed the notice of Louise’s followers.

Ultimately, this very creative and promising approach was only half a strategy.

A carefully crafted character telling her story via social media can be compelling and draw people in to pay attention. Done right, her online life may feel very real. For the purposes of motivating behavior change, she should either evoke empathetic feelings of “she’s like me”or aspirational thoughts that “I want to be like her.” This they did well.

The problem was that they posted happy (or neutral) pictures of a beautiful young woman with a drink in her hand for two months without depicting any consequences of her alcoholism. There was no indication that she was addicted to alcohol beyond the glasses in her hand, which escaped many people’s notice. If, once they had a critical mass of followers, Louise started posting photos – or including text in her Instagram posts – that hinted at problems in her life resulting from her drinking, the people who were engaging with her would start connecting the dots themselves.

Having the ad agency say “na-na, gotcha!” and explaining their strategy at the end of the campaign is a case of telling, not showing. It takes people out of the narrative and has much less impact than if they saw a realistic depiction of the effects of alcoholism on someone they had started to care about (even if they found out she was not real).

The other big problem with this campaign is that it normalized the behavior they were trying to prevent for two full months. Many of the people who saw images from her account likely did not see the big reveal at the end, and only took from the postings the subconscious connection of alcohol and a glamorous life – the equivalent of free advertising for the alcohol industry. Social media plays a significant role in establishing and reinforcing social norms. We have to be careful in social marketing with the imagery we use; attractive depictions of undesirable behaviors can far outweigh any negative text that accompanies the pictures and the message will backfire.

Entertainment education can be incredibly effective, but it has to be done with an understanding of the behavior change models that work.

By now you’ve probably been inundated with emails and articles urging you to keep your New Year’s resolutions. But for social marketers, the need for creating behavior change—whether your own or that of your priority populations—is year-round.

Here are some tips from a social marketing perspective for ways you can build support for long-term behavioral shifts into your programs, that can also work in your own life (bonus!).

1) Set and track goals
Know what specific behavior you’re trying to change. Rather than just saying you want people to “lose weight,” make the plan more concrete: Eat 6 servings of vegetables every day. Have protein as a snack rather than carbs. Go for a 30 minute walk every morning at 8 am. Offering ways to track progress will provide a feedback loop that continues to motivate as success breeds success.

2) Create habits through behavioral triggers
The more automatic we can make the desired behaviors, the less we have to rely on willpower alone to do the job (which is often not a very hard worker!). Habits arise when something triggers us to take an action – it could be when we’re doing something else (e.g., eating while watching TV), when we feel a specific emotion (e.g., checking Facebook when we feel bored), or when we get a reminder (e.g., the 6 o’clock news comes on and we realize it’s time to make dinner).

Find a regular event that you can link the desired behavior to, such as making a healthy lunch for work the next day right after you finish dinner. Or use reminders like a sticky note on your bathroom mirror helping you remember to floss your teeth when you’re in the right place at the right time.

3) Design the environment for success
Create a situation that enables the desired behavior and makes it hard to veer off the chosen path. This could involve limiting the choices available (e.g., only buying foods that fit healthy guidelines), getting prepared in advance before decisions are made in the heat of the moment (e.g., setting up an automatic monthly transfer of a portion of your salary to a savings account), or surrounding yourself with reminders of your ultimate goal (e.g., taping a picture of your kids onto your cigarette box to help you remember why you want to quit).

These tips are just a few of the ways that a social marketing perspective can help you help your community to become healthier or better off. Behavioral science insights can be applied to your New Year’s resolutions as well as creating positive change throughout the year!

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Weinreich Communications, I’m thrilled to share with you a new ebook I created to help social impact professionals get started using social marketing in their programs. This free 22-page publication is designed to inspire those working in nonprofits or the public sector, and others seeking to create health and social change in their communities, to use the effective, systematic social marketing approach.

Even if you’re already a social marketing pro, I hope you’ll download the ebook to share with your colleagues or clients who may not be as familiar with how marketing can be used to create social impact. It lays out the key principles of social marketing, provides lots of resources and has a section for those who are considering social marketing as a career. Please help me spread the word about social marketing and let me know what you think about the ebook. Thanks!

When the opportunity arose to write for some of the characters, I decided to go for it, as the realtime portrayal of a character via social media had always intrigued me. While there was an overarching storyline for the game, which took place over several months, there was a lot of leeway for character development and story arcs for individual minor characters. With almost 30 different characters in the story, with several writers covering two or more characters and quite a few more people who started creating a character and gave up fairly quickly, there was a lot of opportunity for interesting stories to play out on the sidelines of the main storyline.

The main story centered on an inventor named Rex Higgs who discovers blueprints for a machine called a “time switch,” builds it, and ends up on the wrong side of an evil multinational financial investment company called the Agent Intellect Corp (AIC). One of my characters, Lauralee Simcoe, is a corporate communications assistant working at AIC whose only functional role in the game is to have players hack into her online account at AIC for information. I created a story arc for her that involved her experiencing clinical depression, getting treatment and recovering. The strategy behind the narrative was to engage the game participants by getting them emotionally involved in Lauralee’s story, with elements of education, modeling and an accurate depiction of potential roadblocks and their resolution.

I’ve compiled excerpts from the story across various social media platforms to give you an idea of how Lauralee’s depression subplot played out over the five months or so of the game on the Storify site.

About Nedra Weinreich

Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories.